Wordie: Zenzizenzizenzic: Comments

Comment by yarb, 1 day ago

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:29:36 +0000

Where have you been all my life?!

Comment by cricket, 6 months ago

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:23:50 +0000

Favorited! This is such a fun word!

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Fri, 04 May 2007 12:32:42 +0000

Seems to me you'd need "Scrabble Plus" for this one. ;-)

Comment by arby, about 1 year ago

Thu, 03 May 2007 23:55:26 +0000

This would be totally killer in Scrabble! Unless maybe there aren't enough z's in the game to use it.

Comment by oroboros, about 1 year ago

Thu, 03 May 2007 21:39:33 +0000

At least!

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Thu, 03 May 2007 15:08:45 +0000

So...censodicensodicenso could possibly be the Italian version of the word. Or is it censodicensodicensodicenso? ;-)

Comment by oroboros, about 1 year ago

Thu, 03 May 2007 11:03:23 +0000

The zenzizenzizenzic of a number is its eighth power. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his work The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557, although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike.

The word is obsolete except as a curiosity; the Oxford English Dictionary has only one citation for it. It survives as an historical oddity.The word dates from a time when there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers other than squares and cubes. Its root word is the German zenzic, from the medieval Italian censo, meaning "squared." Since the square of a square of a number is its fourth power, Recorde used the word zenzizenzic (spelt by him as zenzizenzike) to express it. This is a condensed form of the Italian censo di censo, used by Leonardo of Pisa in his famous book Liber Abaci of 1202. Similarly, as the sixth power of a number is equal to the square of its cube, Recorde used the word zenzicubike (a more modern spelling, zenzicube, is found in Samuel Jeake's Logisticelogia) to express it. Finally, the word zenzizenzizenzic denotes the square of the square of a number's square, which is its eighth power. Zenzizenzizenzic has more Z's than any other known word in the English language.

--from Wikipedia

Comment by jennarenn, about 1 year ago

Wed, 02 May 2007 19:07:22 +0000

I honestly didn't think that it was real.

Comment by alguien, about 1 year ago

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:04:25 +0000

That is so cool.

Comment by tsherel, about 1 year ago

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:31:25 +0000

The eighth power of a number.